As with choosing a domain name registrar, ask your friends for a recommendation. There are plenty of bad hosts out there, but there arc also plenty of good hosts out there—a personal recommendation from a friend or trusted associate can help ease the confusion of picking a host out of the masses. If you have an established site or have been working in web development for very long, there isn’t much that we can tell you that you haven’t already heard.

Communities can sometimes be resource intensive. The larger the community the more intensive it is. Large communities sometimes need to tweak their server settings and/or script settings to minimize this and even give a community its own server or even an army of servers. (This is just for your information, however, as if your community is new – you are nowhere near needing to think about this unless you expect to be profiled by USA TODAY or the Watt Street Journal tomorrow or something like that.)

If you’re just starting out and you plan to be just a basic discussion community, you can probably begin with a basic plan that won’t put much of a hole in your wallet. PHP (the coding language that many community software options are written in) and MySQL (a database management system that many of those same options use to store your community’s posts, member information, and other data) are popular solutions (although there are others). If you go that route, make sure that your host offers at least PHP and MySQL so that you are able to host your community site. You should check the community software s resource sites for recommendations on how much space and bandwidth it would be wise to start out with. Be sure to contact any potential host and ask if you can upgrade your plan to a larger one at the drop of a hat. It is important that you have this flexibility in case your community grows suddenly.

The larger your community gets, the more bandwidth, space, and resources it will require. You need to be able to host all community files (including users’ uploaded avatars, images, attachments, and more) as well as the database and backups of the database. To make the most of your money and server space, you should probably go through the server from time to time and remove anything that is not needed. As an example, many servers have stat programs installed by default. The longer your site runs and the more visitors it gets, the larger these files will be. If you find them useful and want Eo keep them, you may want to download them to your computer and then delete them from your server to free up that space every once in a while. All hosts go down from time to time, but you want a host that minimizes its downtime and has excellent support. Downtime itself is not a reason to leave a host. How a host responds to downtime and how often it occurs are, however. It is beyond the scope of this book to go into any great detail about hosting or the technical aspects of managing the server that will be home to you community.

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